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Friday, June 10, 2016

Factorying Factorio

We left off last time with researching the technology for basic factories. Making objects with the nanites in our super-suit is fun, but it's not really a factory game if we don't have actual factories. Which I kind of need to use, or I don't feel at peace. Why do things yourself when you can have robots do them for you?

This is the recipe for basic science beakers

Our research finished and I build our first factory object. Factories work similar to furnaces. Supply it with the necessary ingredients, and it will produce a finished good. Factories are much more varied in what they can produce though. Basic factories can produce any recipe that has 2 or less ingredients. This one by itself isn't terribly useful. We can transfer the copper plates to it easily enough, but also making the iron gears before anything useful is done would be a pain. Instead of doing that ourselves, we'll make more factories instead.

If I were smart, I'd have put an inserter to take the beakers and put them in the science lab

That's better. I drop copper plates in the red factory, and iron plates in the chest, and this setup will work to keep producing items. But I'm still not thinking enough like I should. Automation is the goal; I want to do the least amount of work for a given point as possible.

This game has a day/night cycle. A mod I use makes it gloomier.

Much, much better. Inserters move the iron plates to the transport belts, the belts continuously move items placed on them in the direction of the belt, and at the end inserters take the plates off the belts to be used in the factories and to allow for easy pickups. Glorious! Of course, there are still holes. Each of the furnaces still has to have coal delivered, I still need to deliver copper plates to produce red beakers, and coal needs to be delivered to the boilers to keep the lights on.

In effect, this is how the game goes. I build up sections of the factory that, once I'm done with them, take no additional inputs in order to keep running. Then I move on to other parts that need work done on them, with the occasional shortcut needing additional attention.

If you're clever, try and spot where I went wrong with the new addition

Give that I want to keep the lights on more efficiently than carting fuel back and forth, I add on belts from the coal mine to the boilers. I also expand the whole bit so that I won't worry about power for a good long while. The night is dark and full of terrors. Best to keep the lights shining bright. And by lights I mean big polluting furnaces.

They look uglier when alive

With the boilers setup, we get our first guest: a weird looking thing that could only have been designed by a crazy hippy. I was able to easily put it down with my survival pistol, but I'd prefer to be better prepared for later attacks. Luckily I'm almost done researching our first military tech which will give access to a submachine gun and shotguns.

These things are crazy. No idea who spread them to this place, but they've done a number on this world's biosphere. There's the usual trees and plants, but no wildlife that I can see, outside of a few fish safe in their watery habitats. A hippy's experiment gone wrong, they work wonderfully to stop polluters. Getting a whiff of pollution (sections of the map in the minimap get steadily more red to indicate having more and more pollution) will drive them bad, sending them long distances in order to attack the source of pollution.

Even better, they'll feed off of this pollution. More pollution will cause them to reproduce, expanding in number. As well, they'll evolve into bigger and stronger versions of themselves, doing more damage and requiring more punishment to be put down. There was a whole swath of information on them in astronaut survival school. Sadly the only way to really take care of them is to eliminate the infestation one by one. We'll automate that of course, once we're more situated. For now, we kill them off by ourselves, and try to minimize damage to our factory. This hippy madness will be purged.